It’s almost over

All good things have to come to an end, so celebrate the end this long and challenging harvest. We are in the final stretch and will be picking the Biodynamic Wallula vineyard this week and next and will be closing our doors around the 20th of November – the latest harvest in recent history. The preliminary results are showing high acid wines, nice botrytis tone and low yields overall. The high acids will push us to produce sweeter styles this year to balance out the extra acids. The botrytis that we usually desperately look for in normal vintages has overwhelmed us in 2010 – the wines should reflect a more waxy, honey like character this vintage. Lower yields will guarantee a short supply of WA Riesling this year, it will be interesting to see how the market receives a very Germanic vintage from Washington – me like it despite the added stress, you?

The results from the GDD race are in, 2003 will end at 2325 which will put it in on par with 1974 and 1970 – 2003 is now the 9th coolest year in WA on record (http://rieslingrules.com/the_book/2010/09/20/). The final GDD chart for the year is below:

As I have hinted before, we will probably not make a dry Riesling this year except for our Wallula Biodynamic and Solstice Rieslings single vineyards (they will probably be close to 1% RS so not fully “trocken”). As far as cool and new wines we are exploring, we are still trying to make a decent TBA, very scary wine to make, the jury is still out on this one so stay tune. Another experiment this year is a 100% carbonic maceration Gamay – that is also a bit of a work in progress right now.